Until recently a deep but generally unnoticed contradiction has existed in the ways in which English and Irish historians have viewed the reigns of Edward VI and Mary. For English historians the years between the death of King Henry and the accession of Elizabeth have traditionally been seen as years of profound instability and almost unrelieved crisis. It was a time when the fragile consensus of the English political nation was fractured by the eruption of radical political and religious divisions, when the stability of the commonweal was undermined by economic crisis, made worse by personal incompetence, greed and corruption, when narrow self–interest, factional intrigue and rebellion reduced the government of England to a state of chronic powerlessness and, in Pollard's daunting phrase, ‘sterility’.

All of this has contrasted sharply with the way in which Irish historians have traditionally understood the significance of the period. To them these were years not of indecision and ineffectualness but of radical innovation, in which the English government broke away from its long dalliance with diplomacy and procrastination and launched instead into a determined campaign to gain control of Ireland by the establishment of plantations and firm military government throughout the whole island.

The recall of St Leger as deputy in May 1548 is conventionally understood to mark the inauguration of this radical change of policy.